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The Beauty of Web 1.0
There’s something that I just love about the look, feel and thought process behind “web 1.0” websites. They’re colorful, low res, and just really bad in such a special way. But I’ve come across some websites that have blown me away, how they can be so simple but so unique with just some simple heading, paragraphs, and images.
What is Web 1.0?
This is an era where the web was a fraction of what it is now. It was the time where websites were built server side and given to the client as static pages, mostly just simple personal pages someone put together as something personal to them and their lives. The era began when Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first version of HTML in 1993, as an attempt to organize the growth of information on the internet. It allowed you to define basic headings, paragraphs, links, and images, this made the task of building a website much more attainable to the average person.
A year later, a Norwegian technologist named Håkon Wium Lie proposed the idea of a programming language that allowed you to design website content, who at the time was a co-worker of Berners-Lee. The language allowed you to define some style guidelines for the elements on your page like layout, font, and color. This turned out to be the first iteration of CSS.
With these simple parameters, people were still able to make their website feel personal.
https://geocities.restorativland.org/CollegePark/Lab/1221/
GeoCities
https://geocities.restorativland.org/Area51/Dunes/1021/GeoCities was a web hosting service that allowed people in the 90’s and early 2000’s to publish their websites for free. The site was organized in ‘cities’ or ‘neighborhoods’ based on their content. For example a page relating to theater was put in Broadway or a page about aliens was put in Area 51. You can explore more at the achieve page Here.
There’s a really cool project https://www.cameronsworld.net (check this out) that has scraped these achieves and collected the pieces that make them so good.
Where does it fit today
There aren’t any real uses for the Web 1.0 style other than, you felt like it.. or you were bored of the copy and paste shadcn, mui or tailwind components you can find in the web design ecosystem (All still amazing tools). There are some concepts and inspiration from Web 1.0 that you can carry into your next wireframe or design.
- Don’t immediately reach for a library
There are so many thing’s that vanilla html, css and js can do for you now that people have forgotten the power they can bring. Consider learning the tools you have before adding new ones. There are new features in css like nested selectors(Read More) and the @property rule (Read More) that went under the radar.
- Think Minimal.
If you do want to use a library, try out something new. I’ve been experimenting with these.
- https://kbrsh.github.io/wing/
- https://milligram.io/
- https://andybrewer.github.io/mvp/
Chances are, if the project you’re working is quite simple, maybe its a docs or landing page, you don’t need 90% of what the larger libraries offer, maybe you just need a layout utility or some responsiveness. So why not keep the libraries that you use in line with the complexity of your project.
- Look for inspiration from other sources, not the docs.
I find myself looking through docs a lot and just kind of branching off the examples they provide. There is so much content out there, look around reddit or GitHub for some ideas to draw from.
Here are a couple I really like